UCLA study: porn improves performance

In a recent study, scientists claim that men who watch more than three hours of porn a day are better able to hold erections than those who do not.

The study, published in the journal Sexual Medicine, concluded that visual sexual stimuli (VSS) in fact may improve erectile functioning. Researchers say to watch up to 25 hours a week, or more than three hours of porn a day, for improved and sustained sexual arousal.

Jim Pfaus, researcher and professor of psychology at Concordia University, and Nicole Prause, a research scientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, led the study of 280 men. Half the men were in relationships at the time of the study.

Pfaus and Prause aimed to find a relationship between time viewing VSS and sexual responsiveness felt with a sexual partner. Participants also rated their arousal after watching a couple having sex in the laboratory setting.

The researchers found that increased viewing of VSS results in stronger sexual responses to the laboratory porn tests, a stronger sex drive when with a partner, but was not linked to erectile function when with a partner. VSS was also associated with more positive attitudes about sex, and the researchers claim it could apparently reduce anxieties about intercourse that commonly lead to erectile dysfunction.

Marieke Dewitte, a researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, argues that men may not get “that turned on” by sex scenes due to the wide “availability of porn on the Internet.”

In an interview with OZY, Pfaus compared porn’s correlation with depression to food’s correlation with being overweight. “Food doesn’t make you fat,” he explained. Instead, eating poorly makes you fat. Likewise, porn doesn’t cause depression; it is simply a secondary effect.

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